Friends

My friend and her two little boys, one who is Superson's bff are on holidays and we are on the fun tour. Today we drove two hours and did waterslides all day long. Yesterday it was Spruce Meadows (horse jumping) Tuesday a BBQ party from 3-11pm. Camping. Boating. We have no idea what day it is, and my back is still sunburned from being on hubby's boat all day long on Sunday in heat heat heat.

I have written nothing. But our kids are having fun and my friend and I are having lots of girl bonding time. So that's all good.

Camping in Dinosaur Park


Water fun

I'm late, but here are some more photos from last December, taken on The Evergreen State College campus. Photos for Day 5 forthcoming!


A better view of the clock tower and the center of campus at night. Not sure why they had an odd light out.

( More photos... )

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see. (Thanks to angelina41 for this list)

1) Look at the list and bold and highlight in orange those you have read.
2) Italicize and highlight in blue those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-) 

NOTE: This should help us keep track of the books we want to read, shouldn't it? Maybe...?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (all the way through, mind you)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (only 15 plays)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnet
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

TOTALS
Read out of 100 = 26
LOVED out of 100 = 21
Want to read = 19
Don't care if I ever read = 55

The lost footage to the silent movie Metropolis has been found!

I adore that movie. I hope this means I can see the entire film someday once they get it all restored and reassembled.

 My favorite part about living in Salt Lake City is the mountains.  I just love them!  Seeing them everyday no matter where I'm going or what I'm doing, they have become almost my friends.  

Instead of  photos today I am posting a video I made almost two years ago.  It was an afternoon I spent with Tyler at Silver Lake up Big Cottonwood Canyon.  Please excuse my dorkieness.  I didn't expect to have myself in the film so I wore a stupid outfit.  When I put the film together, I knew I needed to be in it, even if I look silly.  Okay, that is enough vanity.  I just love the mountains and the lakes and the alpine marshes and forests up that canyon.  It is also just a little ways past where I go snowsheoing in the winter.  It is beyond beautiful!

In the video, you will see me take a hidden notebook from a behind some rocks in a tree hollow.  Tyler and I do Letterboxing.  This is one of the boxes we placed.  It is called the Silver Lake Box.  If you want to learn more about this quirky little hobby, go here:  http://www.letterboxing.org/

Thanks for letting me share the mountains with you all!

It was raining today. So our tour is going to start at my own front door......

this is the only plant I have ever grown, from seed! it is about 10 years old.....


When I think of attractions in our hometown, I don't really have to look far, on an average day 6 teenagers, and random 20 somethings are entertained here... our family room......


We hope to give this room a big face lift this fall, these are BEFORE pictures I took, because this room is WORN OUT...


And last night when I went to bed at 1:30 they were hanging out here...........


So if you like playing pool, hanging out on worn furniture, and swimming in the night... you would like this local attraction too! : )

Know that I love you, kitty... you were so special!

The results are in, and John's kid's hands down favorite was....


*******************************************
The Bunny Mystery by Adrian

Bunnies are small. Bunnies are round,
Bunnies are shy and don’t make a sound.
Bunnies are brown. Bunnies are white.
Bunnies are quick to hop out of sight.
Bunnies have ears. Bunnies have toes.
Where bunnies hide, nobody knows.
Bunnies have bottoms, bunnies have legs,
But what kind of bunny poops chocolate eggs?
**************************************************

The kids couldn't resist the poop part, and John would have totally loved this. Adrian please email me at kpluta-at-cox-period-net (remove dashes and replace appropriate words with punctuation).

Two other poems also received special mention from the family, and as soon as I get around to it, I will send you something via email either suitable for printing and framing or using as an avatar.

The first one is .....
******************************************************
Footprints by Diana Murray

When the snow has fallen, all is still,
Until white bunnies frolic on the hill.
I never see or hear them, but I know
They're here because their footprints mark the snow.
************************************************************
John's sister said this brought memories of her brother, and that she sees his "footprints" in the faces of the children everyday.

The next one is .....

******************************************************************
God Bless J's Family and Friends" by cocoskeeper

Little rabbit, soft gray fur
Whitens some in the winter brrr

Snuggles close to those he loves
Waits for the coo of springtime doves

Tulips bud and beckon him
Sniffs a blossom on a whim

Ears a-twitter, someone’s near
Mate and kits are who he hears

Down come raindrops then the sun
A colored sky for everyone

Hopping, thumping, summer bliss
Kits grow fast from sunshine’s kiss

Autumn comes and red leaves fall
Now kits are rabbits after all

And they thrive as rabbits do
Soft gray angels all year through
************************************************************
John's sister said this sounded like something John, himself, would write, and it made her think of him.

And here is a note from the family:

Please thank everyone for the poems. They were a pleasure to read and we enjoyed each one. Thank you so much for honoring John in such a sweet way.

Hugs to you from us all!

A, A, and A


All winners please contact me via email. Thank you! And thank you to all who participated! I will make this and the other post private in a week or two, so that if the poets want to seek publication for their poems they won't be out dangling around on the net.

We spent the afternoon down at the Huntington Beach Pier for some pictures and a quick swim in the cool ocean. At 38 1/2 weeks, our little girl could enter the world any day now. Man, we're excited.








 

I've so enjoyed seeing all the pictures of cities and sights around the world, really, through cynthialord's wonderful LJ journey of where we all live. I haven't commented on all of them, but I've been clicking through and just soaking it all up!

Today's visit for CO are les fleurs. You won't find the lushness here that is so amazing in other states and countries -- but I love wildflowers, and even some of the annuals that can grow around here are quite beautiful.

Columbine, our state flower (which comes in many colors, but the state colors are the blue-purple and white):

( a few more under here )

don't tell my WIP that I'm here. I've been hammering away all week on a new chapter feeling quite satisfied that words were appearing. And I've been trying to allow for messy writing just to get something down to set up a story skeleton. That's not how I usually write, and I took one look at it this morning and decided it wasn't working. Ugh. So instead of leaning on the delete button prematurely, I'm here.

I've been loving all the photos of your hometowns. It makes me restless and ready to take a trip across the country to visit all these gorgeous places. I've been wanting to post some of my own pictures but it takes me forever to figure it all out. But here's one local sight I never tire of!

1) Revise Section 3 of TT from Carlee's notes
2) Revise Section 3 of TT from Marjory's notes
3) Add falcons to the hunt and Lord Michael's interests
4) Work on Dragon Codex proposals

I would add more, but I think that's quite enough for today! I was feeling very sick yesterday, so don't want to overdo it.

ETA: Revision of Section 3 done! Whoohoo!

154 / 185 (83.2%)

Last week I did an interview with Portrait Magazine, an online magazine for teens. The interview is up as part of their July issue and they've also posted some extra content about Something to Blog About as part of their Book Club feature. So you can check it out for some trivia and a fun quiz. What's funny is that earlier this year I had started to think of questions for a quiz to post on my site about STBA and the very first question on my quiz was a lot like their first question, ha. I never did get around to finishing the quiz. I used to write quizzes for my high school newspaper and they can be really hard to make up!

Their trivia feature also reminds me that I want to post some little tidbits of info about Libby and her friends that didn't make it into the book on my website. Just fun little pieces of background information from my notes while writing the book that don't affect the plot so they weren't included in the story itself. I need to get around to doing that.

Anyway, Portrait has a pretty cool website with lots of content so check it out if you haven't before!

I got very busy again yesterday. I was out taking pictures. Seems like there is someone else hanging out in my backyard.

Be sure and stop by jamarattigan 's blog to check out her view of Occoquan! She is a bit faster than I am. I had planned on wandering out yesterday to take some pictures of the Occoquan river, and the resevoir that you can see in the first google map picture I posted in day one. Guess who beat me to it?

I did wander out though and I am so glad that I did. It is funny, this tour is supposed to show others what our hometowns are about.....until yesterday I didn't even know this little bit of town existed! I stumbled on it when I took K down to a little shop called Paint Your Heart out to pick up a gift his gf had made for him before she left. What I found was what jamarattigan obviously already knew about! A treasure just off the street I travel EVERY day!

This post is picture heavy, so I will post the pics under the cut!

When I was little, I'd pretend that the birds were spying on me. I'd see them perching on the power lines like notes on a scale...so still, they might've been robotic. My best friend, Suzanne, would look for spray-painted codes in the sidewalks---surveyor-speak (I know now). We would make up stories about trolls tunneling under the pavement.

Back then, it felt like the entire world was keeping secrets from us.

Yeah, sure it's 110 on many summer days. But the good part about the desert is that if you can stand the heat (and let's face it, it's not like you hang out OUTSIDE during the hottest part of the day in the summer, any more than you'd hang out outside in 30 below temps elsewhere), you get a lot more sunny, seventy degree days through the rest of the year. One of the favorite things to do around my city is this:
                                                                
Of course, the bike trails aren't always this crowded, only during the big events. 
Plus, if you like hiking, we have lots of that as well:
                                               
And upon request....
                                                      

It's a one pic day because we're headed out the door to the airport for a trip to the States. Today's pic is of Praca do Papa (Pope Park), a park and monument that was erected when the Pope spoke to the masses of Belo Horizonte in 1980. It's at the top of a huge hill (one that I do repeats on when I'm training for a marathon) and there is now a playground. It's a great place to take pictures and eat popcorn. My kids love to go there.

See you when I get to the States!